


Rendezvous

by kamja



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 23:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamja/pseuds/kamja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jun reflects on his relationship with Ohno as he sits in Ueno Park.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rendezvous

Jun went to Ueno Park the day after.

The soda bottle in his hand was slick with condensation, providing minimal relief from the blistering summer heat. The water dripped onto his jeans, creating a wet spot on his knee. Jun barely noticed; his thoughts were a fog, blocking him from the visitors swirling around him as they rested in the shade, from the glint of the sun bouncing off the metal railings, from the cicadas singing in the trees. His body was just there, while his mind struggled to make sense of the past and the present. An elderly woman sat down on the bench next him, fanned herself slowly for a quarter of an hour while she looked at the calm waters of Shinobazu Pond, and then went on her way. Jun didn’t even notice her presence until she rustled her shopping bag as she got up.

He slouched lower on the bench. The thin cotton of his t-shirt stuck to his back, damp with sweat. In the back of his mind, he thought of pulling at the fabric because he hated that sticky feeling, but his arms and his hands felt too heavy. Some homeless people rearranged their belongings on the far side by the lotus pond. A reflection of a swimming duck floated along the surface of his dark sunglasses, ruffling its feathers restlessly.

His body was just there.

They had spent a lot of time just being there. They didn’t hold hands or sit too close, but they shared the same drinks and talked about the same things. Sometimes they brought books and magazines and did nothing but read in silence. Other times they brought notebooks and pens and planned concerts. One time it rained, but he had an umbrella and they sat there anyway. Afterwards they would go out to eat dinner together and kick each other playfully under the table, where the paparazzi never bothered to look.

They spent a lot of summer days at Ueno Park.

“I wanna do that someday,” Jun said once. His gaze tracked a rented boat skimming over the water. A couple – a girl with an umbrella in her hand, her shirtless boyfriend manning the oars – laughed on board, oblivious to the world around them.

“Oh yeah?” was all that he said in response and that seemed to be the end of that. But on Jun’s birthday, he took Jun’s hand and led him to the dock at Shinobazu after-hours, and they took a spin around the pond under the moon.

“How’d you do it?” Jun asked, knitting his eyebrows slightly together. The park was abandoned except for a few hoboes getting ready for bed in their cardboard tents. A stray cat stalked the edge of the water.

“It’s a secret,” was the only reply. The keys to the dock office hung on a lanyard around his neck, swinging back and forth as he rowed the boat. He smiled a sly smile, the moonlight giving his eyes a twinkle. It was a smile that he didn’t show the cameras very much, a smile he never squandered.

Jun hoarded that smile, like how he hoarded all those other little things that didn’t belong to the world. They could never have his way of wrinkling his nose when going outside for the first time on a cold morning. They couldn’t have the way they held hands in the car while Jun drove, their fingers intertwining. They couldn’t have his laugh, his shirt collar askew and his face flushed, after attempting yet again to parkour down the back staircase in the dance building. These things were his. Jun knew that all he had to do was press the issue about the boat, but he was much too busy hoarding. He was greedy in that way.

The shore pulled away as he rowed them towards the center of the pond.

“There was that part in Little Women when Laurie proposes to Amy on a rowboat,” Jun said out of nowhere, some moments later.

“I remember that anime,” the oars went down into the water. “The style was nice.”

Jun laughed. He leaned back and looked up at the sky. “He asked, ‘Will you, Amy?’ and she replied, ‘Yes, Laurie.’ I liked that. Nice and straightforward.”

“Like Domyouji,” if anyone else said that, it would’ve seemed like teasing. But he wasn’t teasing. Jun grinned his little boy grin, and closed his eyes to soak in the cool night air.

There was nothing to be said next, and nothing could be heard except for the splash of the oars and the hum of the cars driving by outside the park. A frog croaked lazily. They drifted around and around.

“Will you, Jun?”

“Yes...” Jun murmured in his half dream-state, but realization crept up and he quickly backtracked. He opened his eyes. “What?”

Now it was his turn to grin, another treasure to lock away, his face alight under the summer moon, highlighting the curve of his cheek and setting the tips of his hair aglow. He leaned forward on the oars, his strong hands gripping the wood. “Will you kiss me, Jun?”

Back on shore, a homeless person cheered them on. Jun pulled off his cap to shield their faces, but he really didn’t care.

Jun went to Ueno Park the day after he and Ohno broke up.

They had spent a lot of summer days in Ueno Park. He didn’t remember who had the original idea. Maybe Ohno wanted to sketch the animals in the zoo. For some reason, they kept coming back, and they always ended up around the boating pond, particularly by this one willow tree. It was a nice spot; Jun liked the way the trailing branches caressed the surface of the water. He liked the way they reflected, the slender silver-green leaves tinkling like coins in the breeze. It had a nice view, too, over the boating pond and towards the lotus pond. The temple on the island at the center loomed up through the treetops off to the left.

He considered the view one day as he took a sip of soda and placed it on the bench between them. Ohno was sketching something with more ferocity than usual. Jun looked over his shoulder for a little while, but then his gaze drifted off towards the pond. A boat floated by and caught his attention.

“I wanna do that someday,” he said, more to himself than anybody else. The girl twirled her umbrella and told a joke.

“Oh yeah?” Ohno didn’t look up from his sketchbook. He traced the figure of a dancing man on the paper, his comical features exaggerated. The girl and the boy laughed, and they went off towards the center of the pond. Ohno started shading the figure with neat little hatches, trapped in his own world. Jun had the strange sensation of being second best to pen and paper.

“We need that shirtless guy too,” and that was what finally made Ohno look up with a puzzled expression, and Jun couldn’t help but laugh. That sensation left as quickly as it had come.

“C’mon,” maybe Ohno had sensed something, maybe he decided he was done. He closed his sketchbook and stood up. “Let’s get something to eat.”

Ohno left his shirt on the dock that night, the keys bouncing against his bare chest as he rowed them around. His muscles barely strained as he pulled them across the water. The oars splashed, sending sprays of water on board. The droplets clung to his smooth skin, glittering like stars.

Those little points of light drove Jun crazy. Jun couldn’t get enough of him. He said it out loud whenever they met. Ohno didn’t get it. He said so every time in response.

Ohno said that he didn’t get a lot of things about Jun, in the end.

The receipt from a convenience store lay in a shredded pile in Jun’s hands. He didn’t even realize he was doing it. He looked up and noticed that a new crowd had moved in along the pond, a school group. A long-suffering teacher led the way, flag in hand. A band of troublemakers trailed at the end of the procession, laughing a little too loudly and kicking up dust as they ran circles around each other, tugging on bags and school jackets. Jun took it as his cue to move on. He got up and started walking the perimeter of the water. The place seemed crowded and noisy for the first time, suffocating. He had never really thought of this place like that.

Jun had never really noticed the other people in the park before, back when it belonged to just him and Ohno.

“We’ll be leading again,” Jun considered the song lyrics in front of him.

“Can you hit that note?” Ohno’s own attention was on a stadium layout, but he’d already heard the demo the other day. They often talked about multiple things at once, new singles on one hand and concert choreography on the other.

“I have to, right...not like there’s any other option,” Jun looked down at Ohno’s untidy scrawl. “Hey, there aren’t any stairs here.”

“No? But then we have to come out through here? What a hassle,” Ohno rapidly crossed out a lengthy block of notes, half-singing his words in that way whenever he was annoyed.

Jun was about to reply when a drop of cool water fell on his head. He looked up through the branches of the willow tree and another drop missed his face, landing on his shoulder. The surface of the pond prickled and wrinkled. “Was it supposed to rain today?”

“There was a chance,” Ohno’s face remained characteristically blank as he reached into his bag and pulled out an umbrella. He opened it as the rainfall gathered strength.

Jun started to stand up, thinking about the shelter of a nearby café, but Ohno tugged him back down. He put the umbrella over their heads and they huddled together, knees and hips and elbows and shoulders touching. The circle of dryness closed in around them, the water dripping off the edges of the umbrella onto the bench. They quickly put away their papers. Then, their hands automatically sought each other out.

“You don’t wanna go out there, to that world where the stairways are in the wrong places,” Ohno said in a low voice. He stared out over the splashing lake, towards the temple. He looked like he might’ve rested his head on Jun’s shoulder, but that wasn’t his style.

Jun glanced up at the umbrella, taken aback by the sudden romanticism. “Did your mom give it to you?”

An embarrassed smirk appeared on Ohno’s face. “No...”

“Don’t lie.”

“...My dad gave it to me...”

“You are so well-loved,” Jun said this part in a whisper, smiling close to Ohno’s ear. He breathed in the rain and the summer heat and Ohno’s laundry detergent and leaned forward to catch Ohno’s mouth before he could say another word.

When the rain stopped, they went to eat at a crowded izakaya by the station. The half-drunken business men didn’t notice them at all, too busy offering each other cigarettes and attempting to cop a feel at the office girls. The waitress seemed to the recognize them, and she appeared at their table with surprising quickness whenever they rang the bell. Somewhere around the third round of beers, their manager called and the spell was broken.

“We could run away together,” Ohno had said another time while he ate ice cream. He pondered the dawn sky. It reflected on the water in blended hues of rose, gold and blue. The early morning was all they had left, after their manager took everything she wanted. He said it in an odd way, as if he was continuing a conversation instead of starting one.

Jun supposed that Ohno really did have an iron stomach, if he could wake up at sunrise and devour ice cream from the convenience store. “Where would we go? What about today’s concert?”

Ohno shrugged, licking his lips. There was a spot at the corner of his mouth that his tongue couldn’t reach. Jun’s hand twitched, wanting to touch. Wanting to pick up those little Ohno things like shiny river pebbles. “We could hide in the mountains and fish all day.”

Then he smiled with his eyes, since his mouth was too busy. “We could get matching tans and no one would care.”

“Uh, I would care,” Jun said it because that was what he was supposed to say, but both of them knew it wasn’t true. “Just a little.”

He grinned and licked his lips again, and Jun couldn’t help it. He reached over and pulled Ohno close.

His mouth was cold from the ice cream, and his lips tasted like vanilla and sugar.

“Take me far away,” Jun whispered when they broke apart, their lips brushing against each other as he said it. And then he realized that this was perhaps the most truthful he’d been in a long time.

Jun walked along the western edge of the pond. Behind him, the teacher stopped the school group to give instructions. The troublemakers fidgeted. Jun put his hands into his pockets and didn’t make eye contact with any of the people sitting along the water. The paths came to a split, one into the land bridge leading to the temple, and the other continuing around the lotus pond. He looked up at the temple and turned onto the bridge.

There was another night when Jun didn’t want to go home so they just sat under their willow tree.

“Don’t leave me,” Jun mumbled drowsily. He was laying on the bench, his head pillowed in Ohno’s lap. His body felt like lead, like it was just there.

Ohno didn’t say a word. His long fingers gently pushed back Jun’s bangs from his hot forehead. He had a bedraggled look about him; his day had started very early, and just when he was ready to go home, he got Jun’s drunken call to meet at Shinobazu. A stab of guilt came through the fog.

“Sorry,” Jun sighed, not crying since boys didn’t cry.

“I won’t leave you,” Ohno stared out across the water. Overhead, a pair of birds streaked through the night sky towards the temple.

By the time the school group disappeared into the zoo, Jun had made his way over the land bridge. The temple loomed up overhead, a knot of tourists gathered at its feet. He’d spent a lot of summer days at Ueno, but he rarely came here. It was dedicated to Benzaiten, goddess of things like water and music and speech. Things that flowed. The tourists jostled around him, their eyes glued to the screens on their cameras and not paying any attention to the world around them.

Jun made a full circuit around the temple. When he came back to face the boating pond once more, he spied a figure by the large willow tree on the far side. It sat down on the bench underneath, and pulled out a sketchbook.

Jun went to Ueno Park the day after, and Ohno was there.

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in a specific spot at Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. If you're familiar with the place, it's a bench under a willow tree on the north side, facing the central island. 
> 
> 1\. hoboes – A lot of homeless people do live in Ueno, because the park never closes. I have no idea what it’s like over there in the middle of the night, however.  
> 2\. Little Women – not only was the book made into an anime in the 80s, they did it twice.  
> 3\. ringing the bell at the izakaya – some Japanese restaurants have a button at the table you can press to call the server.


End file.
